Clio Cloud Conference 2016: Day One Highlights

The fourth-annual Clio Cloud Conference opened with music and dancing in Chicago this morning. With 700 attendees, it’s the largest Clio Cloud Conference ever, and there were plenty of inspiring and informative talks to take in on the first day.

Here are a few highlights:

Jack’s Keynote Speech

Clio CEO Jack Newton gave a rousing opening keynote speech at this year’s conference. After sharing Clio’s inception story—and talking about how he and Clio Co-founder Rian Gauvreau almost went into aerospace engineering—Jack introduced Clio’s Legal Trends Report. It’s the first truly data-driven report on the legal industry.

He also spoke about a few exciting new features in Clio—including a recent mobile app redesign—and announced Clio Apollo, the first ever ground-up redesign and rethinking of the Clio web app.

There is an old adage in advertising—you’ve probably heard of it—that 50 percent of the money spent on advertising is wasted money. The problem comes with knowing which 50 percent was wasted. With this product from Clio—Campaign Tracker, we hope to help you solve that mystery.

Data Insights

Expanding on Jack’s announcement regarding the Legal Trends Report, Clio’s George Psiharis dove deeper into the data. He spoke about the importance of access to data for the legal industry, the importance of responsible data collection, and the need for the legal industry to become a more data-driven profession.

Firms are competing for real estate in Manhattan so that they can get closer to where the transatlantic cable ends, because they want to get their data microseconds faster than their competitors. What about the legal profession? Are we measuring our access to data in microseconds? I certainly don’t think so.

Will we ever get there? Maybe not, but I think the current state of affairs is something that we need to improve in order to embrace the future of the profession.

Finally, the day closed with a keynote speech from Kimberley Motley. Motley is the first and only foreign litigator working in Afghanistan, and she believes in using laws as they’re intended to be used. Her talk moved and inspired many in the audience. See her 2014 TED talk here.

Other speakers from day one of the Clio Cloud Conference included:

Clio’s own Eric Bin and Ryan Sydor, who shared some of their favorite Clio Integrations. These included Quickbooks, Xero, Dropbox, and Zapier.

David Leary, who spoke about what lawyers can learn from accountants and their journey to the cloud.